Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/113

people in love? It is scandalously immoral. What are the police about?”

As the gardens of the Luxembourg were still open, Rodolphe passed into them to shorten his road. Amidst the deserted paths he often saw flitting before him, as though disturbed by his footsteps, couples mysteriously interlaced, and seeking, as a poet has remarked, the two-fold luxury of silence and shade.

“This,” said Rodolphe, “is an evening borrowed from a romance.” And yet overcome, despite himself, by a languorous charm, he sat down on a seat and gazed sentimentally at the moon.

In a short time he was wholly under the spell of a feverish hallucination. It seemed to him that the gods and heroes in marble who peopled the garden were quitting their pedestals to make love to the goddesses and heroines, their neighbors, and he distinctly heard the great Hercules recite a madrigal to the Velleda, whose tunic appeared to him to have grown singularly short.

From the seat he occupied he saw the swan of the fountain making its way towards a nymph of the vicinity.

“Good,” thought Rodolphe, who accepted all this mythology, “there is Jupiter going to keep an appointment with Leda; provided always that the park-keeper does not surprise them.”

Then he leaned his forehead on his hand and plunged further into the flowery thickets of sentiment. But at this sweet moment of his dream Rodolphe was suddenly awakened by a park-keeper, who came up and tapped him on the shoulder.

“It is closing time, sir,” said he.

“That is lucky,” thought Rodolphe. “If I had stayed here another five minutes I should have had more sentiment